Sixtieth Birthday
Yesterday I attained my sixtieth birthday. It is not yet old age, but
the posting-stations between old age and myself grow fewer with what
looks like a bewildering rapidity. The years are shorter than they used
to be. What a length lay between the anniversaries of childhood and even
those of young manhood! How little tedious was the road! And now how
brief and tiresome has the journey from one point to another grown to
seem! One turns and glances back on the traversed road, “looking over
Time's crupper and over his tail,” as the elder Hood put it, and it
looks like a ribboned path through a cemetery. The little child-wife
and the baby lie yonder far away. Nearer, and yet afar off, the grey old
father is asleep. There, between them, is the lad with whom I shared
all my early joy in books. Oh! the raptured miles we walked, seeing
each other home by turns, till long after midnight, each exposing to
the other's view the jewels gathered in the past few days. The memorial
stones are everywhere, and they grow thicker as the road winds on. And
saddest of all are the places where one sees the tokens, not of lost
friends but of dead ideals. Here a faith laid itself down, tired out,
and went to sleep for good and all. A cypress marks the place, to my
fancy, Here a hope made up its mind that it was not worth while to hope
any longer, and foundered in its tracks. There is an ambition, unburied,
to be sure, but as dead as Cheops. “Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans,
and phantom hopes.”
“It's a sair sicht,” as Carlyle said, looking up at the skies on a
starry night; and one asks, in a mood of some despondency, what one has
got to show for it all?--the loss, the pain, the disappointment, the
disillusion. But, come now, let us look the thing fairly and squarely
in the face. Is not Despondency disposed to state her case somewhat too
emphatically? Am I, or am I not, flatly exaggerating in this summary of
losses? Would I have the little child-wife back again if I could?
Can her loss after this lapse of well nigh two score years have left
anything, at most, but a humanising tenderness in my memory? She is a
pretty and engaging recollection, and has been no more at any time for
whole decades, and to pretend that she is a grief is frankly to import
humbug into sentiment. And what had I but a sense of pious thanksgiving
when my grey old father laid down the weary burden of many years and
the crushing pains of hernia, and the breathless agonies of a dreadful
asthma? If I pretend that I would willingly have stretched him
out longer on the rack of this tough world, I am no better than a
sentimental liar to myself. I know in my heart of hearts that I was glad
to let him go. And the lost faith? I believe with all my soul that I
have found a better. And the lost ambitions? What were they but a
baby's crying for the moon? There was a time when I could say with Will
Waterproof, in the _Lyrical Monologue made at the Cock_:
“For I had hoped by something rare
To prove myself a poet:
But while I plan and plan, my hair
Is grey before I know it”
But to one's own plain commonsense it is the poorest kind of business at
the present time of life to sit down and grizzle because one proved in
the long run _not_ to be a poet. I will not deny a certain inevitable
melancholy in the retrospect, taking it all round. Yet even whilst I
feel this, there is an inward protest. The loss is not all loss. The
game of life is one in which we gain by losing, and lose by gaining.
In _The Ghost's Bargain with the Haunted Man_ it was a part of the
agreement that the man should forget all the sorrows he had ever known.
In that atrophy of the heart which followed in that frozen seal which
bound down every rill of human sympathy and pity, I know that there is
the presentment of a great and lasting truth. No man's nature is ripened
until he has known many griefs and losses, nor will it ripen until they
have bitten into him as frost bites into the fallow earth to fertilise
it, and opens it to the uses of sun and air and rain.
There are, of course, things quite apart from loss and the destruction
of old ideals which encumber the path of coming of age with troubles of
one sort or another. The air is thick with the shadows of regret. It is
seventeen years since I shot my first wild boar, and more than fifteen
since the last deer; a stag of twelve tines, as I am a christened man,
fell to my gun. It is thirteen years since I rode into the central pah
of the King's Country in New Zealand, and I have never crossed a horse
since then. It is a quarter of a century since I saw the heights of
Tashkesen, and heard the Turkish and Russian guns roaring defiance
at each other; and the sporting days, and the exploring days, and the
fighting days are all over. I shall never again stand knee-deep in snow
through the patient hours waiting for the forest quarry to break cover.
Think of the ensuing lumbago! I shall hear the thrilling boom of the
big guns no more. I shall never again penetrate into the freshness of a
virgin land. I shall see no more the hammer of the midday sun beat its
great splashes of light from the snow-clad summits of the Rockies and
the Selkirks. The long and the short of it is that I am transformed from
my old estate of globe-trotter and observer of events and nature into
the land of suburban old fogeydom, and the point to touch, so far as I
am personally engaged, is whether really and truly I do very much and
deeply regret the change. Not very deeply, after all, I am disposed
to think. His workshop bounds all to the old fogey who has lived out a
great many of his friendships, but within its limits what sights may he
not see? Calais, first seen of Continental towns, is still a possession
of my own. The Paris of 1872 is mine, the Rhine and the Rhine fall,
Vienna, Berlin, the Alps--the Austrian Alps, the Australian and New
Zealand Alps--they are all mine. Kicking Horse River is mine, and the
steely whirl of the lower rapids of Niagara before they reach the fall.
And, in clear view of the ideals which would shake me from my seat, I
have but one answer to offer them. My shabby study armchair is the seat
from which I look compassion on a struggling world, as a man fairly
drowned and accepting his fate might look on fellow mariners yet only
in process of drowning. Fill the mind with memories of things
whole-heartedly attempted! You have failed or half-failed. Everybody has
failed or half-failed who ever tried to do anything worth doing. You are
not more unblest than the average of your kind.